Scala's ZIO also demonstrates that they're a great idea and can be perfectly ergonomic, but you need type inference, which Java devs were resistant to for a long time (maybe still are? I remember lots of "how will I ever know what `val a = new Animal()` is???"). If you infer the exception type, they're basically invisible except for when you forget to have some place in your program to handle them, which is exactly what you want.